Wonder Boy - he can speak many foriegn language (He is not educated though)

I got this videos forwarded from a friend, this world has still things to amaze me :).
This boy wonder, Ravi is a seller of hand fan made of peacock feather and lives in slum.
While selling he has picked up so many languages from the tourists that he can converse in thier own language (german, japanese, arabic, italian, french and many more).
In the first video which was shot many years ago shows the young Ravi selling, the second video was shot when he is in his teens and he is still on the street selling the peacock fans.

This kind of somehow explains how the kids in SD Millionaire could talk to the tourists in english even though they are illiterate, Money and hunger ensures that we learn anything and do to survive in this nasty little world.
Even though I can speak Kannada/Telugu/Tamil/Hindi/English/Malayalam (little), this one is way  beyond.

In his younger years

In his teenage years

Let us outsource Security and Political work

A strange thought came to my mind seeing the loopholes and the way our Policy makers behave and act during the state of emergency.
What happened for nearly 3 days from 26th November 2008 (26/11) will always remain etched in all our minds for a long long time and will go down in the history as the day where the entire nation was brought down to its knee and was caught with our pants down by a handful of mercenaries from across the border and our government is still napping to point the fingers towards Pakistan, I think we lack the guts of what US has when it was attacked on 9/11, this is what US would have done if it had happened to them
1) Give an ultimatum (maybe 2 weeks or so) to Pakistan to take out the terror training camps in its soil
2) Ask them to hand over LeT commander and Dawood to India within a week
3) Go inside Pakistan (if they don't comply) and take out the terror training camps on its own
4) Put international sanctions immediately to Pakistan so that its crippled economically unless it complies in eliminating all its terror camps

Since I do not see this being done by our Indian government, it would be best for us to outsource all political and security related aspects to US like how they outsource technology work to our country, there are some things we aren't capable of handling or doing and it is time we realize it and let those are capable of doing it to run it effectively.

Yes I am taken over by emotions and may have written this out of anger, but it definitely makes a lot of sense to do this.

When will this mayhem end

Yesterday will be the darkest day for me in the recent past for what has happened in Mumbai and my heart goes out to all people of Mumbai, who are to me the bravest lot at present, these are the people who have withstood time and again the attacks meted out to them.

What would those terrorists be thinking when they pulled the trigger, how can they be so cruel and kill innocent people, if they have an agenda and want to prove then they should fight with the right people and not the general public, we have army for this and waiting for such people to be fought. The pictures shown on TV of the terrorists, show them all to be in thier young age, what would have drove them to commit such a dastardly crime, I just hope that those not turn our to be Indian youths, then we have a larger issue to fight, our own inefficient system which ends up breeding such people. I just wish they are not from this country.

When will this mayhem end and when do we give out strong replies to those involved not just by our voice but something concrete action, I think our intelligence is better than what is being portrayed and we are sure they would be aware of who is behind this and that this attack would have been known atleast to some extent.

I have visited US in recent past, the kind of security checks/being prepared for the worst is the best I have seen, there are absolutely no lapses whatsoever, compared to this, even after repeated attacks in our homeland the government has absolutely failed to instill any confidence to the common man, we are back on our feet after every such disaster is not because of any assurance or safety measures that the government has taken, but because we are all a resilient lot and we know there is no other way for us, WE ARE LIVING WITH A GOVERNMENT (not taking any political party's side) WHICH IS INCOMPETENT AND CARES A DAMN TO THE CAUSE OF A COMMON MAN.

Our own parliament was attacked and what happened, those involved in the attack are still at large or in prison and we are able to nail them down and I am sure this is not the last and there would be many more.

Should I consider myself lucky that I stay in Hyderabad and happened in Mumbai and not here? I really do not know what to say, but what assurance do we have that this wont happen anywhere else. Every time we step into a crowded place or a bus or a train we hope that this wont be the last day of my life.

It wont take even 3 - 4 days for this news to disappear to a small column in page 9 or 10 or the newspapers and all of us focusing on the IPL cricket matches or discuss what movies will the Sharukhs/Salmans/Akshays be acting in and which heroine twisted her ankle and what new product are our cricketers endorsing and see how the opposition and the ruling parties fight it out as to who is better to handle the situation, will this ever change???

We can only pray that whoever is behind these attack realize that all this are wrong and stop by themselves, because there is no way our government is capable of stopping this.

Let us all pray that all those who have been killed and their soul rest in peace and sincerely wish that all this ends today.

Pics takne during the HCI course

I have started uploading the pics taken during the HCI course at IIT Mumbai.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kumarsatishn/sets/72157600640966074/

HCI Course - IIT Mumbai

Today is the 3rd day at IIT Mumbai, attending the course on HCI (Human Computer Interface), its been quite interesting course, I am learning lot of new stuffs (some boring though).
Ulhas, Vinu, Yogesh, Srinivas and myself have come over here, this is a 10 day course from July 3rd to July 13th.
The travel from Bangalore to Mumbai in Deccan airlines was an experience to remember, the travel is cheap in Deccan but also scary, the landing was so bad that it scared the shit out of us and there were few women folks who were praying for a safe landing, I would think twice again before flying in Deccan again. Srinivas threw up due to the landing (this was apprarently his first flight).

Professor Anirudh Joshi is the person who is handling the course.
First 2 days have been learning about the concepts, CI - Contextual Inquiry, 5 sutras of Interview (interviewing the users is one of the most important aspects of the entire usability design process).
We went around the IIT campus scouting for people to interview for the Home accounting software project we have choosen, our hit ratio has been 2:3, both the person we interviewed were pretty friendly and gave us lot of input, we are supposed to interpret the interview and find out Key Observation, Insights, Design data, etc.....

In the evening it gets quite boring as we do not have much to do, but from tomorrow we have decided to explore the surrounding areas...